


Perhaps Not Perfect

by Oshun



Category: The Last of the Wine - Mary Renault
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-17
Updated: 2015-12-17
Packaged: 2018-05-07 06:12:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5446139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oshun/pseuds/Oshun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I felt a sudden rush of the past upon me; for a moment grief pierced me like a winter night; yet it came to me like an old grief, I had suffered it long since and now it was behind me. Everything is change; and you cannot step twice into the same river." <i>The Last of the Wine</i>, Mary Renault.<br/>Many thanks to Ignoblebard and just_jenni for the Beta read and the encouragement.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perhaps Not Perfect

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fawatson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fawatson/gifts).



After Lysis married Thalia, I tried as best as I could to put forward a good face, most especially, in public. It was my duty to preserve his honor, as well as my own. I needed to portray him as the best of lovers and the truest friend and myself as the most fortunate of beloveds, happy for him in his new life. Of course, he had been and was all of those things! But my heart was a dark, arid cave, emptier because it had once known such light and joy. I had thought to feel pain and yearning, but I had not even enough hope to leave myself a basis for longing. Lysis asked me to dine with him as often as he could afford. When I came to his house, he greeted me, always gracious and happy to see me, and gave me the most affectionate salutations from his young wife. He claimed she wished me the best as his particular friend. I believed him, but it did not lessen my grief. It did make me feel ungenerous in my envy. 

I tried, and I believe succeeded, in not presenting the appearance of a whipped dog. Our city was no longer our own, we all lived in peril and soul-shattering hardship. The streets of Athens were preternaturally quiet during the day and with few lanterns in a courtyard or doorway to break the impenetrable darkness of the city’s streets at night, as though everything light and beautiful had been sucked out of the air. There was nothing left for me in Athens which had always been my heart’s home.

Well, not precisely nothing. I still had Phaedo. Many afternoons I sought out his company, although we spoke little. I made myself comfortable in his sparse, clean room, and read or napped on his pallet in the corner, while he worked. I had no need to bother to pretend with Phaedo and he tolerated my company without lecturing. He went about his business of copying books and, when he had a student, he did not ask me to leave, assuming rightly that I would never interrupt a lesson. Time dulled my pain, but did nothing to alter my sense of hollowness. 

At last an opportunity presented itself when I could invite Phaedo for dinner. I faced an evening with both an empty house and a hen for the pot, if a rather old and scrawny one. 

Phaedo arrived early with a leather flask of better wine than I had seen in a long while. He glanced approvingly around the courtyard. We were short of everything, and the walls were in need of whitewashing. But we had maintained a modicum of pride even throughout those darkest days. The house and grounds were neat and well-swept. 

The bird had been made palatable by long stewing and careful seasoning. Phaedo’s decent wine was a luxury indeed. Even well-watered it went to my head quickly. We talked of philosophy and argued about mathematics. What taste I had ever had for calculations and figures I had lost, but I enjoyed seeing Phaedo’s cheeks turn rosy with agitation at my apparent stupidity. Yet, I could not fool him for long.

“You’re not even trying, you rascal. You are teasing me,” he finally stated in a carefully neutral voice, the beginnings of a grin quirking at the corners of his mouth.

“Only a little,” I replied. “I enjoy making you smile and you are lovely when you blush.”

He tossed his head, flipping a lock of pale hair out of widening dark eyes. “Are you flirting with me, Alexias?” 

“I would never presume to do so. I respect your privacy and would do nothing to endanger our friendship. It means the world to me. It’s all that I have left.” My voice cracked and he reached to cover my hand with his own.

“Are you so certain it would be unwelcome?” His eyes narrowed, unflinching in their candor.

“Truly, I had presumed so.” My chest loosened almost imperceptibly, an all but unconscious rigidity giving way to a frisson of thrill or dread, or both. “I had assumed you looked down upon my needs, although you have been hugely patient with my self-indulgent grieving. I thought it another sign of your virtue that you, who had so thoroughly renounced such appetites in favor of philosophy and the greatest good, loved your friends so truly that you did not presume to judge them—in this case me—for my apparent weakness.”

“You are still charmingly innocent, my dear, sweet Alexias. Despite war, death, and wrenching disappointments, your boyish belief in the virtue of others whom you care about remains intact. And did you think that I was able to hold the position of first and most appealing among my master’s pleasure slaves if I had no skill or interest in the act itself? I am the first to admit that the majority of my clients pleased me not at all and that pleasing them was the most arduous of chores, playacting one could say. However, in order to act, the actor must know something of the emotion he desires to mimic. For this reason the great tragic actors must be old in years and not simply young men long in talent or large in voice and lungs. A man must have suffered in order to be convincing at communicating torment. In my gratefully abandoned profession, to excel required that one know what pleasure feels like. I had a Lysis in my youth, dear one. And, despite everything—the trauma and the bitterness—there were a small minority among my clients who pleased me all too well.” 

This was the longest speech that I had ever heard from Phaedo. Even in the discussions with Sokrates wherein he had truly shone, he did so in few words and with greater subtlety. Could he truly be saying that he had sometimes enjoyed his work?

“Not everyone who visited me was a monster, Alexias,” he said, as though he could read my thoughts. I _had_ followed his logic, but still did not believe the words I heard. “Because I believe,” Phaedo continued, “that a philosopher _ought_ to strive for the purification of his soul, for the separation of it from its bodily attachments, does that necessarily mean that he will always be successful? Further, is it possible that the greater good may be achieved at times by honest acknowledgement that one falls short of perfection?” When Phaedo raised his eyebrows at me, I still wondered if he might not have been making a joke. Phaedo was not generally one for jokes, but he had been strange all evening.

“Did you _love_ any among them?” I asked. I could not separate love from the idea of physical intimacy with a man. I had turned my back on perfection for a physical manifestation of the love of my dearest Lysis, so recently denied to me, perhaps forever. I had accepted the good while denying myself the best without remorse. And I never would regret it. In fact, I was unsure if I even wanted to try to think about such things. The wine had gone to my head and the nearness of Phaedo in such an unusual mood made reason or philosophy near impossible. The thought of physical intimacy between Phaedo and a strange man or men made me feel faintly ill. But then it occurred to me that, despite all that, I myself desired Phaedo, as I had, from time to time, over the years since we first met him.

“I will be blunt, dear Alexias. I was fond of some and yet felt no desire for them. Contradictorily, I cared little to nothing for others perhaps, and yet felt more physically drawn to some of them. You _do_ realize that I was treated well, don’t you? After everything I suffered and had lost, I enjoyed having the most comfortable room in Gurgos' establishment and the best of everything. My greatest privilege there was that I was not forced to ply my trade in the same rooms where I rested, read, and slept. And, after I met Sokrates and the others in our circle, like you and Lysis, I learned to look upon myself with less self-loathing and later even a renewal of self-respect.”

“I always esteemed you,” I insisted, feeling as though I was arguing with him somehow. “You bore no shame in my eyes nor in those of Lysis. I placed the shame in other quarters,” I said archly, sounding offended, as though he had accused me of undervaluing him. My anger interestingly enough was based in nothing he had said but against the harsh treatment handed him by an entire people, my people, as though defeat against such odds were not punishment enough. I thundered on, inarticulate and stumbling over words, passionate in my own unwarranted self-righteousness. I caught an expression of indulgent forbearance flicker across Phaedo’s austere countenance. 

I caught myself up short. “Ah, Phaedo, how do you tolerate me? Until I took up modeling for Chremon . . . and other things. . . ” I raised my eyes to meet his, hoping he caught my point without the need for detailed description. “. . . then, the shame I felt caused me to wonder if you had ever felt the same.” I had been an excellent model, while failing miserably at the _other things_. It was difficult for me to believe, but believe it I must, that Phaedo was saying that he had been good at those things. No doubt that failure on my part was why the sculptor had turned me away sooner rather than later. Unless one enjoyed the perversion of humiliation of one’s partner, and Chremon showed no such inclination, any congress between the two us must have been as joyless and barren for him as it was for me.

“I felt something closely akin to that, I imagine,” Phaedo said. “At times I may have felt more shame than you did and at other times less. After all, I did not choose my occupation. I _did_ , however, choose to be good at it.” He sighed deeply. “Your garden smells wonderful, green and fresh. It’s so still and quiet here. As though nothing existed outside of these walls.” He smiled at me, tender and, for the moment, not so wise, imperfect in his kindness. His skin and pale hair glowed golden and his lips looked invitingly pliant in the light of the lantern hanging in the doorway. “Is there any more wine, beautiful Alexias?” There was no mockery in his use of the nickname of my youth.

“There is a little of my own—nothing nearly as pleasant as what you brought. But I have work tomorrow! I’ll earn enough to buy some food and a little more wine at least.”

“Ah, but then it does not need to be as good as my vintage, does it? We are more than half-inebriated already.”

“Wait. Don’t move,” I said, feeling desperate and eager, yet still not knowing what to expect next. “I will be back in a moment.”

When I returned with the wine, I stopped for a moment to watch Phaedo leaning against the lattice of the largely decorative grape arbor near our tiny frog pond. The three-quarter view of him in the light of the full moon, cast him marmoreal and, once again, untouchably perfect. _Well, perhaps not perfect_ , I thought. Long limbed, lightly-muscled, but harmonious in all of his proportions, Phaedo nonetheless retained the slender, lithe body and delicate-featured face of an ephebe, a youth poised at that transient moment between the boy he once had been and the man he would become. Yet Phaedo, from what I could surmise, was closer in years to Lysis than to me. I did not know his age, but he must have been nearly thirty. My own beard, although I was younger and kept my face closely shaved, had long since coarsened into that of a grown man, while Phaedo never showed the faintest shadow of facial hair upon his jaw. Of course, the return of the summer sun each year brightened Phaedo‘s hair to a clear silvery blond and the beginning of a beard on one with his coloring would be less noticeable. 

His youthful appearance, which would have been viewed as a flaw in a warrior of his age or the head of a household, had been an asset in his former occupation. The kind of men who sought affection or physical release at an establishment such the one where Phaedo had served out his time preferred young men of his slender grace and with less defined muscle than depicted in the popular statutes of heroes. I recalled hearing it said that certain types of people recited poems cataloging the curves and angles of the finely wrought beauty of Phaedo’s much lauded visage. I never heard those verses myself. Such people were not welcomed in our circle. 

Cruel destiny had stolen the last of Phaedo’s formative years, and then mocked or blessed him with a lingering phantom of the ephebe in his appearance. The fresh bloom of his fairness in another might have recalled innocence and inexperience, but the acuity reflected in his dark eyes caused one to think of carvings of Dionysos in the androgynous form of a pretty, desirable youth. To me he was simply Phaedo. That night I realized for the first time, however fine or noble his aspirations, that he was simply human, tied to the earth, and fond of me, accepting my superficial beauty as well as my foolishness and often faltering good intentions.

He looked up and caught me watching him and held out his hand to me. “Don’t be shy, Alexias. Let’s have a little more wine. I can never give you anything similar to what you have shared with Lysis. I do not have it in me, nor do I think you’d want that from me. But I can offer you heart’s ease for tonight at least. Honest and simple. Can you accept that?”

“Yes!” I stammered. He pulled me to him by one hand and touched my lips with his own, his kiss as light as the wings of a butterfly.

**Author's Note:**

> My thoughts and backstory for this short story:
> 
> Alexias observes Phaedo earlier in the book than the point at which this story is set, saying that, “ _Even I myself felt something of his attraction; for Eros had certainly smiled upon his birth. But to him it had all become such a weariness and disgust as the oar is to the rower. I was as safe with him as with my father_.” Aware of how Mary Renault dearly loves to experiment with the trope of the likable and/or sincere unreliable narrator and only slowly reveals subtle clues to possible lapses in a character's self-knowledge and/or understanding of others, I choose to believe that Alexias does not necessarily know Phaedo as well as he thinks he does. Is he entirely disgusted by the act of love? Or is Phaedo guarded and extremely private?
> 
> In this story, more or less AU depending upon one’s understanding of the canon and/or one’s personal preferences, Alexias initially recognizes only a part of the truth about Phaedo. As has been done in fanfiction before, my backstory includes Phaedo having an erastes who died in the defeat which precipitated his enslavement (when Athens attacked Melos and then proceeded to kill all the men, and sell the women and children—Phaedo’s youth alone saved his life).
> 
> Everything about Phaedo is colored by the sudden precipitous changes in his life: his position as an aristocrat turned slave, of being used as a male prostitute, and, a few years later, having his freedom purchased through the intervention of Socrates. His life as a freedman and a foreigner living in this xenophobic environment is not a continuation of the thread of his previous life, but the beginning of a new one. Creative interpretation of Phaedo is complicated by the way in which the historical Plato might have fictionalized and embellished Phaedo (one might label it Plato's RPF of Phaedo) in order to make his own points, and how much of that enters into Mary Renault’s very compelling characterization. Phaedo has always been one of my favorites as written by MR. That does not mean, I cannot experiment with him myself. 
> 
> Phaedo in _The Last of the Wine_ appears to be wise for his years, intellectually gifted, well-educated, and as someone who holds himself in rigid control. He is also mysterious and secretive, an under-examined but gripping supporting character in this novel. I assume in my modest tale that Phaedo could never have approached a younger man whom he might have feared incapable, for whatever reason, of effective consent. This sensibility, however, does not necessarily mean he would never have felt desire ever again. And, although Phaedo does put philosophy above his personal life, he does not necessarily do so in the way that readers most often assume he does. I hope you enjoy this version.


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